The overall objective of this proposal is to discover how the infant processes and remembers visual information in his environment. We already know that in the first few months of life infants can make subtle discriminations between stimuli, but we do not known how the infants do it. The research presented in this proposal represents an attempt to find out. Enough evidence on infant visual perception and information processing is available for us to begin to formulate a theory of the early development of information processing ability. Specific predictions can be derived from the theory, and in this proposal we intend to test some of those predictions. Should the results support the theory, we will be well on our way toward explaining how the infant goes from processing simple sensory stimulation at birth to processing meaningful semantic relations sometime after the first year of life. To assess infant visual information processing, we will use an habituation procedure. After repeated exposures to the habituation stimulus, infants will view selected transformations of the stimulus in the test. An examination of the transformations producing dishabituation will then enable us to determine the type of information processed at each age. By habituating infants to a series of different stimuli, all of which represent exemplars of a single category or concept, we shall also be investigating the origins of concept formation in the young infant.